Communicator (communicator) wrote,
Communicator
communicator

The In crowd

I'm still thinking about the transformation of society by technology (why hasn't it happened yet). By technology I mean blogging, the Internet etc. One point of view I have heard is that technology has made people more cliquey, more polarised. The logic goes like this: under the old system, social links were based more strongly on locality. You don't pick your neighbours, hence you could have social links with people of different beliefs, ethnicity, political leanings etc. Nowadays technology lets you make links based on choice instead of contingency, and so people naturally gravitate to people 'like themselves'.

You can see the logic of this argument, but I don't think it holds. Thinking only of people I've friended on livejournal (leaving aside all the other blogs I check out) I connect to a pretty broad spread of political opinion, religious leanings, taste, ethnicity etc. I may even have some LJ friends who are not SF fans (though that may be pushing it a bit far).
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  • GCSE Computer Science

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  • 11 comments

  • Phew what a scorcher

    I see Gove has backed down on climate change and it's back in the curriculum again.

  • GCSE Computer Science

    My book is now for sale

  • LJ Settings

    At the moment I have set up this journal so that only friends can comment. I hate doing this, but I was just getting too much Russian spam.